Thursday 15 October 2015

Cults - summary info

Yo,

Here's some info you can use for the key question:

Manson Family
Charles Milles Manson was born on 1934-NOV-11 or 12; sources differ. He is a person with an unusual ability to dominate others. He assembled a destructive, doomsday cult around himself, which the media later called The Family. At one time, it numbered in excess of 100 individuals at the Spahn Ranch some 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles CA. Manson was referred to both as "God" and "Satan" by his followers. As the family's guru, he claimed to be a reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
This quasi-communal cult arose in California during the late 1960s. The Manson Family teachings seemed to revolve around Armageddon. It has been reported that, “[Manson] had a strong belief and interest in the notion of Armageddon from the Book of Revelations. Scientology and more obscure cult churches such as Church of the Final Judgment were also fleeting interests.” It was these ideals and teachings that led Manson and his followers on a murderous crime spree.
The Family, along with Manson, are thought to have carried out at least 35 murders. Most of “The Family” members were never tried due to the lack of evidence or because the alleged perpetrators were already serving life sentences for the Tate/La Bianca killings.

KKK
Founded in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for blacks. Its members waged an underground campaign of intimidation and violence directed at white and black Republican leaders. Though Congress passed legislation designed to curb Klan terrorism, the organization saw its primary goal–the reestablishment of white supremacy–fulfilled through Democratic victories in state legislatures across the South in the 1870s.
A religious tone was present in its activities: "two-thirds of the national Klan lecturers were Protestant ministers," says historian Brian R. Farmer. Much of the Klan's energy went into guarding "the home;" the historian Kathleen Blee said its members wanted to protect "the interests of white womanhood." The pamphlet ABC of the Invisible Empire, published in Atlanta by Simmons in 1917, identified the Klan's goals as "to shield the sanctity of the home and the chastity of womanhood; to maintain white supremacy; to teach and faithfully inculcate a high spiritual philosophy through an exalted ritualism; and by a practical devotedness to conserve, protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights, privileges, principles and ideals of a pure Americanism."
  
Westboro Baptist Church
Fred Waldron Phelps, Sr. (November 13, 1929 – March 19, 2014) was an American pastor who headed the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), an independent Baptist church based in Topeka, Kansas. Phelps attained notoriety primarily from his vehemently anti-gay activism and his picketing of funerals of homosexuals and soldiers.
Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is an unaffiliated Baptist church known for its hate speech, especially against LGBT people (homophobia), Jews (antisemitism), and politicians. The church is categorized as a hate group and is monitored as such by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. It was headed by Fred Phelps (although shortly before his death in March 2014, church representatives said that the church had not had a defined leader in "a very long time"), and consists primarily of members of his extended family; in 2011, the church stated that it had about 40 members.
The church is noted for its anti-homosexual rhetoric and runs numerous web sites such as GodHatesFags.com, GodHatesAmerica.com, and others expressing condemnation of homosexuality. The group bases its work on the belief expressed by its best known slogan and the address of its primary web site, God Hates Fags, asserting that every tragedy in the world is linked to homosexuality—specifically society's increasing tolerance and acceptance of the so-called homosexual agenda. The group maintains that God hates those who engage in homosexual activity above all other kinds of "sinners" and that homosexuality should be a capital crime.

Jonestown
Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, best known for the mass murder-suicide in November 1978 of 909 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, and the ordering of four additional Temple member deaths in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital.
"Jonestown" was the informal name for the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project formed by the Peoples Temple, an American religious organization under the leadership of Jim Jones, in northwestern Guyana. It became internationally notorious when on November 18, 1978, over 900 people died in the remote commune, at the nearby airstrip in Port Kaituma, and in Georgetown, Guyana's capital city. The name of the settlement became synonymous with the incidents at those locations.

Former Temple member Tim Carter stated that the reasons for choosing Guyana were the Temple's view of a perceived dominance of racism and multinational corporations in the U.S. government. Carter said the Temple concluded that Guyana, a predominantly Indian, English-speaking socialist country, would afford black members of the Temple a peaceful place to live. Later, Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham stated that Jones may have "wanted to use cooperatives as the basis for the establishment of socialism, and maybe his idea of setting up a commune meshed with that."

KOP!

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